Enhancing bodily expression and communication capacity of telexistence robot with augmented reality

This paper focuses on realization of embodied remote communication via telexistence robot with augmented reality (AR). Though a robot equipped with communication functions can realize natural conversation remotely, the robot has to reproduce bodily expressions of the robot user for achieving embodied communication. A humanoid is optimal shape for the purpose, but this kind of robot is currently expensive and difficult to popularize. By contrast, a 3DOF head-moving robot is easier to develop, but the bodily expression capacity is limited. To solve the trade-off problem, we propose an AR-based presentation system visualizing additional body-parts of head-moving robot. The developed system consists of a head-mounted display (HMD) worn by an operator, a 3DOF robot controlled by the operator's head movement, and see-through AR glasses worn by an interlocutor who faces the robot. For visualizing bodily expression, the system generates 3D-CG image of virtual avatar which copies operator's body movements, and projects the image onto both operator's HMD and interlocutor's glasses simultaneously. Consequently, proposed system provides body gesture functions to 3DOF robot, and achieves embodied remote communication.